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Winter Soldiers: Epilogue

By Richard Stacewicz

Richard Stacewicz spent countless hours and traveled many miles to conduct the interviews that make up Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. VVAW is grateful that Richard was able to capture our voices, since so many of those interviewed have now passed. Richard embodied the activist academic, who would not let the academy restrain his struggle for justice, on the streets and in the classroom. He was a true ally in the struggle and a friend of VVAW. He will be missed.

My own involvement in this oral history of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War began during a later war–the Persian Gulf war. On January 17, 1991, the day after the United States had launched an attack on Iraqi forces in Kuwait, Barry Romo, a Vietnam veteran who was a national coordinator for the VVAW, was arrested as he approached an anti-war rally near the Kluczynski Federal Building in Chicago, where he had been scheduled to speak. As he crossed Dearborn Street to reach the rally, Romo was suddenly surrounded by half a dozen officers of the Chicago Police Department who threw him to the pavement, subdued him when he tried to get up, and then whisked him away in a paddy wagon. Actually, Barry had done nothing to provoke his arrest, but he was charged with assaulting a police officer and was held in custody for the duration of the rally before being released. Then, while he was awaiting trial, he was forbidden to travel outside a hundred-mile radius around Chicago; he was, therefore, unable to appear at other anti-war demonstrations across the country where he had also been scheduled to speak. He was never tried: three months after his arrest, the charges against him were dropped.

I had been present at the rally on that cold winter evening in Chicago and had witnessed Barry Romo's arrest, although I did not yet know who he was. I learned of his identity the next day, from a local radio broadcast. Because I had felt that his arrest was unjust, I looked up his telephone number and called him to give my support, and to offer to testify in his defense. This incident was the beginning of my relationship with the narrators of Winter Soldiers.

Barry Romo's arrest, which seemed obviously designed to keep him from speaking out against the escalation of American involvement in the Persian Gulf, piqued my interest in finding out more about the VVAW. I was then a graduate student in American history, with—I assumed a solid background in the history of the Vietnam War, but I realized that I knew very little about VVAW. I had seen its name mentioned in several books on the war and the anti-war movement, but the accounts of its activities were generally very brief and were limited to descriptions of a few major episodes during the height of the war. I was particularly interested in finding out who the men and women of VVAW were. Why had they decided to oppose the war in Vietnam after serving in the armed forces? What had happened to them? And now, two decades later, why would a veteran like Barry Romo feel the need to speak out against a war in which he was not a combatant? One of my purposes in creating this oral history was to find answers to these questions. However, I also wanted to consider a broader question: what these veterans' experiences, in the Vietnam War and afterward, might tell us about American society, and the American military, in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Richard Stacewicz speaking at VVAW Veterans Day event in Chicago, November 11, 2008. Joe Miller holding the banner.